Pre-teen venture capital… Best/worst taxi cities… E-shoppers dawdle

Oregon-based bank Umpqua has moved to become an angel investor in an as yet untapped niche – the lemonade stand. Springwise reports Umpqua’s Lemonaire campaign is aimed at helping “really small entrepreneurs” start their own lemonade stand, and pick up some business skills while they’re at it.

After completing an application, kids can pick up a free lemonade starter kit that includes cups, napkins, a sticker, a table cover, a small business guide (How to Become a Lemonaire) and $US10 start-up capital. Everything but the lemons, really.

Dutch Postbank, is also trying to get in on the ground floor with tomorrow’s entrepreneurs with its Bizznizz program. Participating kids get a briefcase containing materials for printing their own T-shirts, stickers, letterhead, flyers and business cards.

Once a business has been selected, a client has been secured and the first job completed, the kidpreneur can log back onto the website to print an invoice and have the client transfer the money to their bank account.

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Ever tried to get a taxi in Canberra during a Parliamentary sitting or on the weekend? Canberra is the hardest place to find a cab in Australia, according to figures compiled by the WA Department of Planning and Infrastructure from data supplied by local taxi associations.

The ratio of taxis to people for each capital city:

Canberra 1:1260

Adelaide 1:1151

Brisbane 1:1033

Melbourne 1:1005

Perth 1:934

Darwin 1:927

Sydney 1:842

Hobart 1:522

The problem is that the taxi drivers don’t want authorities to issue any more licences, believing that it is devaluing the trade in the ones they already own.

Online shoppers are now spending 80% longer to make a purchase after first entering an e-commerce site than they did in 2005, according to a ScanAlert study of 2.6 million online sales reported in Marketing Charts.

Shoppers are taking on average 34 hours and 19 minutes from the time they first visit an e-commerce site to when they finally make a purchase, according to the report, almost twice as long as the 19 hour 11 minute average they took in 2005.

Data presented in the report, “Digital Window Shopping: The Long Delay Before Buying,” shows the delay is now more than half a day (80%) longer than in 2005.

“The primary reasons for the increase over 2005 are greater sourcing choices, and the availability of broadband access at work and in the home,” report author Nigel Ravenhill, ScanAlert’s director of marketing communications, told Marketing Charts.

Ravenhill says the key lesson for retailers is that they must use a much longer time frame to calculate return on investment of their pay-per-click advertising campaigns and make memorable websites that shoppers will remember long after they leave.